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An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Ars Technica scraped a ton of gameplay data from Steam's player profiles to provide statistics on how many people own each game, and how often it's played. For example: 37% of the ~781 million games owned by Steam users have never been played. Dota 2 has been played by almost 26 million people for a total of 3.8 billion hours. Players of CoD: Modern Warfare 2 spend six times as long in multiplayer as in single-player. This sampling gives much more precise data than we usually have about game sales rates. 'If there's one big takeaway from looking at the entirety of our Steam sales and player data, it's that a few huge ultra-hits are driving the majority of Steam usage. The vast majority of titles form a "long tail" of relative crumbs. Out of about 2,750 titles we've tracked using our sampling method, the top 110 sellers represent about half of the individual games registered to Steam accounts. That's about four percent of the distinct titles, each of which has sold 1.38 million copies or more. This represents about 50 percent of the registered sales on the service. ... about half of the estimated 18.5 billion man-hours that have been spent across all Steam games have gone toward just the six most popular titles.'"

Agreed. I really like the idea of Steam as well as their customer service and general philosophy. However I dread loading it up on OS X because it's such a bloated piece of shit. I wish you could just shut it down once the game was running.

I bought an ID pack at some point. I've got 2 Hexens, Hexen2 and Heretic that I've never played, with 3 quakes, 3 quake 2s, and 2 quake 3s. So far I've only played Quake II.

I bought the Sid Meier humble bundle which came with Civ5 a bunch of its expansions, and Civ IV, and III... I've played Civ V a bit so far... but have 8 separate entries for Civ IV in my steam library, along with Civ III that I haven't touched. Along with Pirates! and Railroads. I'll probably play Pirates! at some point... who knows about the rest.

I've got and Sam & Max set, that I'm part way through... so 3 titles I haven't touched out of 5.

I've got 5 episodes of Back to the Future that came with another humble bundle that was worth the price of entry to me for something else. I might try it at some point, who knows... its pretty low on my priority list though.

I wouldn't be surprised that others who are avid supporters of humble bundles have lots of games they've yet to try.

Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.

I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming, and it's been gradually downhill ever since as focus shifted to multiplayer, or incorporated RPG elements. (Quake 4 was also pretty good, but it was a deliberate throwback to those days).

To me the point when HL2 shit the bed is when they pulled a Bioshock Infinite and fell in love with a gimmick...the gravity gun. In HL2 the GG was just another weapon, used in a couple of spots but other than those spots it really wasn't required. What did we get for EP 1? Gravitypaloza. By the time I was being forced to shoot basketballs at striders I was just sick of the stupid gravity gun, just as I got sick of infinite shoving that damned skyhook under my nose going "Isn't this neato"? Sure it was, befo

Play Pirates, it was fun in the original "boot up your XT with the floppy" version, good in the mid-90s with "Pirates Gold" and the latest version is pretty much the same deal with better graphics. One of the better games i've ever played.

Play Pirates, it was fun in the original "boot up your XT with the floppy"

Yeah, that's the one I have a LOT of nostalgia for and why I expect to play it.:) I've read they've largely kept the original style of the game intact... right down to ship combat and the fencing. Looking forward to it.

I noticed things like "Half Life 2: Lost Coast" is very high on the owned by unplayed list. But I think people got that for free as part of HL2 at some point? I know I've got some HL2 add on that I've never touched (too disappointed that it wasn't a full game with an actual ending, so I'm not continuing that franchise). I think I have one or two other things that are in that category.

Also left 4 dead 2 was given away for free not too long ago, though it has a much smaller percentage of "not played". I s

And it likely never did. It was a big bunch of scare mongering, "Oh no the pirates are cutting hard core into our profits!!!!"

There is a basic fact about piracy... most people who pirate software fall into two categories:

1. The group that bought the software, but wants to remove it's DRM.2. The group that will NEVER buy the software, regardless of price or DRM.

I think Steam proves this. Piracy is still alive and well, yes? So it wasn't a problem of accessibility. Steam erased accessibility issues. Bottom line: Pirates are likely never to be your customers, no matter what.

People are willing to spend $2000 on a gaming PC and then will pirate a $30 piece of software, so obviously these are people who are willing to pay for games on some level...the idea that nobody pirates as an alternative to buying strikes me as ludicrous, because the people who are most into piracy today are the sort of people who spent all their money on computer games a decade ago.

And it's believable to me that if all "Game of Thrones" torrents became unavailable, more than a few people would be motivated

I don't feel the slightest amount of guilt torrenting Game of Thrones episodes. This is accessibility issue. I am HAPPY to pay for it. I already have Seasons 1 through 3 on Bluray. As soon as they put 4 on Bluray, I'll buy it too. Not going to stop me from watching the torrents, what difference does it make? I'll be paying for it, as soon as they let me.

But there is no way I'm wasting hundreds of dollars on a cable+HBO service I don't want or need. I don't even LIKE television stations, of any kind.

Right now, the three most pirated games on piratebay are goatsimulator, Minecraft, and Sims 3. Goat Simulator is $10 off steam (very easy), Sims3 is $20 off steam (very easy) Minecraft is any easy purchase as well. What do you want, it's $1 and they mail the DVD to your house on a silk pillowcase?

that Defense Grid didn't make the list, I've put over 148 hours into it and would have expected most people that own the game to have done the same. It's the only game on Steam that I have every achievement for.

I've got 76 hours on that one, and steam says I've got 57 of 87 of the acheivements. Honestly. I'm impressed that you completed it to 100% some of the expansion pack stuff is pretty brutal.

I think the most interesting thing though about the defense grid stats is 'first blood'... only 87% of the peop

Probably not a major factor to the whole study, but there are two issues for detecting the game being played by time played:

1. The time played started being recorded a couple years ago. Games played before that default to zero. For example, I put on probably hundreds of hours of Counter Strike 1.6 in High School, but it is listed as unplayed in my Steam profile

2. I didn't see how they handled game expansions, which are often listed as separate games, but they are unplayed. For Borderlands, I have four additional "games" with no playtime

I have severa games that I never "purchased" that ended up in my Library. I dont know how they ended up in my Library, but I never paid a cent for them. I researched the issue (I wanted to clean up my library) and found that there was no way to remove them. Also I learned that many other people had the same issue of games magically appearing in their library. Because of this, I am going to assume that the numbers they used for their findings are invalid.

Valve or individual game developers occasionally mark games as free, and they get pushed out to just about everyone with an account. The article noted that those titles have near-universal ownership but very low play times, since the freebies aren't usually what you choose when deciding what to play.

Yeah, I have a lot of those too. I even ended up with a duplicate copy of Civ IV and all its expansions, plus games like Sniper Elite and Red Faction: Armageddon that I definitely never purchased. Also, the multiplayer for a lot of games is a separate Steam title.

The 'Hours Played' is a horrible metric. I've left Civ V running for days when I play in the evening, but don't bother quitting when I go to bed and work in the morning, then come home and play for an hour or two in the evening. 6 hours real play, 72 recorded as 'time played'. Same for other games.

I often buy a humble bundle, load up the games, leave them running to "earn" the badges, shut them down, uninstall them. (Then sell the cards, get Steam Wallet cash, buy more games, get more badges, etc....)

Are you sure you're making a profit? Leaving your comp on all the time to accrue playtime hours costs power, though I'm not sure how much it would be costing you. When looking at dollars and cents balancing though, I think it should factor in.

10 hours with a 100W idle, even (nowhere close to screen-off usage, but let's over-estimate) - 1KWh. Unit price for that doesn't compare to even one trading card sold for penny-cheaper-than-every-other-similar-card for me.

Plus, I normally just have the game on in the background while I'm doing other things on the machine, so the actual "real" usage of electricity etc. is basically zero.

I've spent maybe $5 on cards. And saved close to $50 using the coupons I've gotten from crafting steam badges. Granted some of the coupons were for games I would never buy or wont run on Linux, but I can trade those with friends.

It's even worse... for games like Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings, steam launches a launcher...which then sits in the tray to download updates and such. From that launcher, the game can be loaded, and it persists past closing the game.. and that launcher is what steam tracks for 'hours played'.
What you end up with is steam informing you that you've played the game 168 hours this week... but you never actually had the game on at all. I'm listed at over 8,000 hours in those games, nowhere near t

It can be skewed the other way, though, by offline mode. I have some games listed as unplayed that I've played to completion, but in offline mode so nothing was recorded.

And then Half-Life 2 can be skewed back up because, at least as of several years ago, Source mods would log as HL2. I don't think that's still the case, but I also don't think they could retroactively fix that data.

The premise is a non-starter anyway; how many games do Steam users own? The answer is none. The fact that people can be confused about this should tell you that Valve isn't doing enough to tell users what the terms are.

Still, interesting statistics. The methodology is messed up because Valve only started tracking time with the current system in 2009 and I would've figured that even without that factor, more games would've gone unplayed. The achievements are generally how you tell game completion, so if you

You do realize, with a good number of games, you can register your 'owened' CD registration number with steam, and then have your game available on your steam account on any computer you are at, without needing to dig out that CD again, right?

Technically you don't own much of any game. If you go buy some game on cd it's still licensed not owned, they just don't have the technical means to stop you from playing should they choose to revoke your license.

Came in publisher bundles that represented a way to get a bunch of other games I wanted for a lot less than buying them individually would cost. I know there's a racing game I got in one of those that I have never installed and never will just because racing games aren't my cuppa.

Does Valve know any time I've played such and such games, on which servers and so on? Are data anonymized when surveys or such sociological studies are made?

It is one troubling aspect, or the biggest one. DRM philosophical arguments almost do not matter. When Amazon knows what books you've read, even down to the last page you've viewed for every book (that was in the news about recently) you have a situation that goes further than what the science fiction books and movies from the 60s and 70s and earlier anticipated.

This is from Ars Technica, which used sampled statistics from every user's public profile page (it threw out non-public pages as a sample for obvious reasons).You can bet Valve does know with a lot more accuracy your play habbits. The points is SO WHAT? Where's the Evil part? I know they used countless kill / death spots in TF2 maps years ago in order to help balance the play on those maps and that helped to improve the balance and play. Riot games (League of Legends) has a lot of jobs for Big Data engineer

NSA and other government agencies taking advantage of security holes in steam or infiltrating valve to spy on you and collect data (aka conversations, etc, etc). Anything chained to online DRM naturally leaves you open to being spied on.

Not only that, should valve store sensitive data on their servers about you (studies/etc). This could be stolen by hackers. Online just opens a huge can of worms. You're not thinking about what being exposed to the online wo

I'm not really sure how your favorite TF2 loadout could constitute "sensitive data." And if you're using Steam's IM feature to send messages you don't want others to read, you should probably stop now because they're not encrypted and everyone on the internet can read them in the clear, not just the NSA.

How you spend your time online, what you play, what websites you access. That information can be correlated and traced back to you. Say you move to another country, fire up steam. bam IP address, etc. Anytime you are tied to a website that you are communicating with you are leaving breadcrumbs from which who you are, how you spend your time and what kind of person you are can be reconstructed with math and theory.

Assume for a moment that it's harmful if the data, including IP addresses, timestamps, unique IDs, etc, gets shared with the world. The data was previously inaccessible due to technology, now it's only limited by the policies of the holding company. Some people don't trust those policies (or the comany's security) as much as they did the old model.

So is it harmful? The timestamp / IP combos place you at a given place (most likely home) for a period of time. There are dozens of other companies with the same

"Does Valve know any time I've played such and such games, on which servers and so on? "

Almost certainly, yes. Typical of any system that keeps logs. Welcome to the Interwebs. Are they handing that data out? Probably not. If you read TFA, you'll see Ars came up with a clever method to scrape data using Steam ID numbers, which they have no way of tying to usernames or real identities. So, pretty anonymous.

Your username is on your profile page, as is your real name if you've chosen to disclose it (but not the Steam account name used to log in). I'm not sure what happens if you link your Facebook account to your Steam profile because oh god who would do that, but the option is there.

You can put the user ID number into a URL that will bring up your profile page, if it's public. If you don't want your profile info to be public, don't make it public. The data can't be scraped from non-public profile pages.

Yes, if you are playing in online mode (and maybe only if you launch it through Steam - I'm unsure on that point).

This data is in fact shown on your Steam profile, although you can set that to private to let only certain people see it. That will prevent people outside yourself, your Steam friends list, and Valve itself from seeing it.

on which servers and so on?

If it's using Steamworks, I believe so. They often use this for matchmaking - if people often quit a server after only a few minutes, it's counted as a mark against the server.

Stuff like Day of Defeat would often appear on free weekend demos. It's hardly surprising that people kicked off a download and never got around to playing it. Same for other titles which are multiplayer modes, tech demos and so forth. I also expect the likes of Humble Bundle has meant people have gotten download codes for games they've redeemed but never bothered to run. I know I've a few games in my list which are like that.

so if you went to bestbuy, bought the (physical) game box, took it home, installed it and figured out it wouldn't run, would you have called your c/c company to withhold the payment to bestbuy until you were able to run the game? What does Valve have anything to do with a game working or not working? It's not that physical stores allow you to take back opened software nowadays either...

What does Valve have anything to do with a game working or not working?

Precisely. I don't think I have purchased or even seen a game in recent years that did not come with a listing of prerequisite hardware/software.

If you entered into a purchase, received the goods, then stopped payment, I think Steam have every right to put a hold on the account you used until further information was received. What were you expecting, an apology from them because you didn't read the hardware prerequisites for a product you purchased?

If you don't dick them around, they provide a pretty damned good service.

so if you went to bestbuy, bought the (physical) game box, took it home, installed it and figured out it wouldn't run, would you have called your c/c company to withhold the payment to bestbuy until you were able to run the game? What does Valve have anything to do with a game working or not working? It's not that physical stores allow you to take back opened software nowadays either...

If he had gotten it from Best Buy he'd have basic consumer rights to refund, a working product, etc. enforced by policy and executed by a human (be it a sales associate, manager, whoever).If he had gotten it from best Buy he would have received actual human interaction when first complaining about it. Best Buy may be a joke and the Geek Squad may be a ripoff, but the mere presence of a human being who has some idea of how to troubleshoot shit, or at least whose job it is to keep customers happy, is about 87 miles ahead of Steam's "support".

Steam support simply doesn't exist unless you threaten to issue a chargeback or sue. No human at Valve even SEES your support ticket until 2 automated "solutions" are generated and spit out - 1 blaming your ISP and 1 telling you to delete clientregistry.blob or reinstall Steam. After that they blame the developer and close your ticket.

Best Buy would have made a decent effort to please an upset customer by offering free Geek Squad support to the point of diagnosis / asking Chris to look into it (instead of Frank, who's just does sales), but not free repairs/upgrades. Best Buy would have jumped at the opportunity to upsell him some Geek Squad if possible after that first assessment.

Regardless of it being open, he can return it and get an exchange for the same item easily in the US, and for store credit fairly easily in the US.He can retur

Nonreturnable Items: Opened computer software, movies, music and video games can be exchanged for the identical item but cannot be returned for a refund

He can get an identical copy of the software, thats it. No refund. Why? Because people buy software, return the disk, but burn the CD key so it's no longer valid.

Also, you've never worked at a retail store's computer repair before. Its "We can look into it... at a discounted rate" or if they do look into it for free, its put on low priority and put off until someone finally gets around to it.

That 37% sounds about right for me. I've purchased a couple Humble Bundles for one or two specific games, and in the process acquired a number of other games which I never play, and never intend to play. I'm probably not alone.

I always redeem my Humble Bundle games through Steam, but never actually play them that way.

I only bother to redeem them as yet another backup in case something happens where Humble disappears and my own backups of installers are destroyed. Which is damned unlikely, but since it doesn't cost me anything extra to have what amounts to yet another backup, why not?

Out of 2,750 titles tracked 4% were interesting/playable to gamers using steam.I wonder why people are discouraged about buying games without playing them first.

That 4%, the top 110 games, have made approximately $8,000,000,000. And that is just 50% of the sales numbers, "represents about 50 percent of the registered sales on the service".It doesn't sound like piracy is making much of a impact to me.

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